West Hartford Industrial Design Studio Reimagines The Light Switch

WEST HARTFORD — A small team, working from a smartly cluttered design studio at Legrand's offices here, wants you to think about your light switches.

Beyond their important work, do they really express who you are, like a color of paint or type of cabinet handles? The problem, the team comfirmed, was that for most people they don't.

Legrand, which recently released a new line of sharply designed light switches, found that when people remodel — spending dozens of hours and thousands of dollars honing in on the perfect hue of paint or the styling of tile or the design of cabinets that fits the sensibility their ideal home — they overlook the light switch.

In some cases, people put the old switches back on the wall, perhaps painted, but not substantially changed. On the expressive continuum between finishing nails and paint color, light switches seemed to land closer to the hardware.

"I pay attention when I put in drywall, but I don't get emotionally invested in my drywall screws. They disappear," said Phil Prestigomo, Legrand's director of industrial design, standing next to a wall-full of light switches in a converted industrial space on the grounds of the company's plant and North American headquarters.

And it was from here that the design team took off, trying to push the light switch from the non-decision category to the decision category.

The company's new line of switches and other home electrical equipment, called Adorne, is an attempt to sell the North American market on a more expressive vision of the light switch, the sort of thing more common in fashion-forward countries like France and Italy.

After years of work, Legrand designers settled on a large rectangle faceplate — that's interchangeable — and a smaller inside square that serves as the switch or toggle or tap that turns the light on or off.

The Adorne line has traditional switches, paddle switches, dimmers, timers and night lights. Some turn on and off with a tap, like an iPod. One has a detachable flashlight, and one switches with the wave of a hand.

The switches are only recently available nationally, in Lowes and Home Depot stores, and have been for sale in some markets since last September. The prices come in higher than normal switches: a standard switch and plate come in around a dollar, while a full Adorne switch cost a little over $9.

In the West Hartford facility, known as Legrand Wiremold, about 550 people work, some manufacturing electrical components and others in corporate functions.

Wiremold, once a company unto itself, was founded in Milwaukee in 1900 and expanded to West Hartford in 1914. In 2000, Legrand, a French industrial group, bought Wiremold for about $770 million, putting its North American headquarters here two years later.

Legrand's playbook for the lightswitch redesigning came mostly written. In the '80s, plumbing was in a similar situation, with remodelers replacing old faucets with exactly what they had before. Then Kohler came out with elegant, expressive faucets, and the market and consumers followed.

"Take a look at the toggle switch," said Mario Gonzalez, Legrand's head of marketing and lead for the Adorne project. "That was introduced in the early 1900s," and hasn't changed much since.

After the toggle, the last major innovation was the paddle switch, which was introduced in the 1960s. But very little has happened since then, aside from few technical innovations like dimmers and sensors, Gonzalez said.

"Nothing has really captured the imagination of the average homeowners," he said. "How can we not only design a better looking product but one that brings a higher level of technology and functionality into it."

The company sees its deep dive and investment as a true reinvention of a common, perhaps overlooked, household staple. Challenges along the way included logistics — getting all the right people in the same place at the same time — as well as engineering. The designers knew they had to make their product fit inside the standard electric box.

"They had to think outside the box to fit in the box," Gonzalez said.

The process took the team through heaps of market research and more than a thousand interviews with homeowners, architects, designers, lighting professionals and contractors. "The question we tried to answer was: Does better design matter?" Gonzalez said.

They found that it did matter. Homeowners given the option of "better designed" light switches embraced the idea, the company said.

And the project's success launched plans for more product line redesigns. Stephen Schoffstall, the company's head of marketing, said that the project was a "catalyst to rethink the level of innovation" across the company.